News

At the end of 2025, the Hungarian Young Academy conducted a survey among the 2025 winners of the NKKP STARTING grant programme in order to gain a more accurate overview of young researchers’ employment conditions and salary situation. Of the 103 STARTING_25 grant recipients, 59 completed the questionnaire (57.3%). 67.8% of respondents stated that they had an permanent contract with the host institution at the time of submitting the application. However, 69.2% of supervisors on fixed-term contracts had still not received a commitment that they would be able to sign a permanent contract for the grant period. Since, according to the law, the total duration of fixed-term employment may not exceed 5 years, this could be problematic in the long run.

Regarding salary conditions, the survey showed that 57.6% of respondents earn less than the standard postdoctoral salary (amounting to three times the minimum wage). This proportion is likely to be even worse in 2026, as nearly half of the winning researchers in 2025 stated that they had planned to supplement their income or receive additional pay at the expense of the grant, which is no longer possible under the STARTING_26 call. This could lead to the untenable situation where the principal investigator — in the absence of other sources of funding — will earn less than the young researcher participating in the grant.

In the document titled “Strategic Considerations Underlying the Development of the National Research Excellence Programme (NKKP)” (available in Hungarian), the Research Council of Hungary makes it clear that in calls for proposals under the NKKP, the provision of senior research positions and “competitive” research salaries is defined as an institutional responsibility.

In our view, however, this approach fails to take into account the realities of the current Hungarian research ecosystem, and places young researchers working at institutions with limited financial resources (e.g. ELTE) at a disadvantage. At the same time, there is a widely expressed demand among some HUN-REN institutions that salaries for categories below senior research fellow be covered by grant funding or from corporate sources. As long as principal investigators could apply for funding for their own salary, there was an opportunity to level out these differences. In light of the new framework, however, there are now hardly any grant schemes left in Hungary from which the young researchers’ salaries could be financed at the desired level. It is our fear that unless the NKKP and the host institutions change their salary policies and seek to provide adequately high salaries, we may see a drastic decline in the number of young researchers in Hungary, with no chance of attracting postdoctoral researchers currently working abroad to return to Hungary.